It was, indeed, a good post!
Just an FYI... I'm not sure how to do it myself, but the hardware boys in our shop found out that the EMC Clarion is capable of making "clones" on the fly... requires a little bit (seriously... just a little bit) of programming in, I think, Perl, but we snap half a tera-byte from one server to our reporting server in less than 15 minutes. It does currently require an outage but it would fit your "synonym" server swaps just fine and I'm sure it would to 50g in a snap.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.